two-worldedness

This is an essay that is mentioned in the back of Vendela Vida's novel Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I just finished and recommend highly. Vida credits this essay with provoking the novel by making her wonder, "What kind of person feels that her past has nothing to do with her present?"

These questions about where the self resides temporally may be interesting to anyone who chooses the lyric mode of expression over the narrative (as well as to any philosphers skulking in our midst.)

‘Against Narrative’


Times Literary Supplement October 15 2004


Galen Strawson




“Self is a perpetually rewritten story”, according to the psychologist Jerry Bruner: we are all constantly engaged in “self-making narrative” and “in the end we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives”. Oliver Sacks concurs: each of us “constructs and lives a ‘narrative’ [and] “this narrative is us, our identities”. A vast chorus of assent rises from the humanities—from literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political theory, religious studies, echoed back by psychotherapy, medicine, law, marketing, design…: human beings typically experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.


I’ll call this the Psychological Narrativity thesis. It is a straightforwardly empirical thesis about the way ordinary human beings experience their lives—this is how we are, it says, this is our nature—and it’s often coupled with a normative thesis, which I’ll call the Ethical Narrativity thesis, according to which a richly Narrative outlook on one’s life is essential to living well, to true or full personhood.


Two theses, four possible positions. One may, first, think the empirical psychological thesis true and the ethical one false: one may think that we are indeed deeply Narrative in our thinking and that it’s not a good thing. Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s novel La nausée, holds this view. It is also attributed to the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius.


Second, one may think the empirical thesis false and the ethical one true. One may grant that we’re not all naturally Narrative in our thinking while holding that we should be, and need to be, in order to live a good life. There are versions of this view in Plutarch and a host of present-day writings.


Third, one may think both theses true: all normal human beings are naturally Narrative and Narrativity is crucial to a good life. This is the dominant view in the academy, followed by the second view. It leaves plenty of room for the idea that many of us would profit from being more Narrative than we are, and the idea that we can get our “self-narratives” wrong in one way or another.


Finally, one may think both theses are false. This is my view. I think the current dominance of the third view is regrettable. It’s not true that there is only one way in which human beings experience their being in time. There are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative. I think the second and third views hinder human self-understanding, close down important avenues of thought, impoverish our grasp of ethical possibilities, needlessly and wrongly distress those who do not fit their model, and can be highly destructive in psychotherapeutic contexts.


To take this further, one needs to distinguish between one’s sense of oneself as a human being considered as a whole and one’s sense of oneself as an inner mental entity or “self” of some sort—I’ll call this one’s “self-experience”. When Henry James says of one of his early books, in a letter written in 1915, “I think of...the masterpiece in question...as the work of quite another person than myself...a rich...relation, say, who...suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship”, he has no doubt that he is the same human being as the author of that book, but he doesn’t feel he is the same self or person as the author of that book. One of the most important ways in which people tend to think of themselves (wholly independently of religious belief) is as things whose persistence conditions are not obviously or automatically the same as the persistence conditions of a human being considered as a whole. Petrarch, Proust, Derek Parfit and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression. I’m going to take its viability for granted and set up another distinction—between “Episodic” and “Diachronic” self-experience—in terms of it.


The basic form of Diachronic self-experience [D] is that one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future—something that has relatively long-term diachronic continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life. I take it that many people are naturally Diachronic, and that many who are Diachronic are also Narrative.


If one is Episodic [E], by contrast, one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms (the Episodic/Diachronic distinction is not the same as the Narrative/non-Narrative distinction, but there are marked correlations between them).

This is just the first 1/6th of the article. Find the rest here. It gets thicker and better.